The Metal Shredders by Nancy Zafris

John Bonner is sure that any time now he will recover from the sting of his recent separation from his wife. And he's begun to wonder if he truly wants to spend the rest of his days running the family scrap metal business, an operation where his employees are likely to have made the very license plates they now shred. His sister, Octavia, has just returned to Ohio from Boston to nurture the pain of her own broken relationship, and she is more certain: following in the footsteps of their imperious father is a recipe for emotional disaster.

But then two of John's more eccentric workmen discover thousands of dollars stashed in the trunk of a car, the remains of a drug deal gone bad. What to do with this unexpected cash draws John and his sister into the lives of their new-found collaborators, sending them all on a surprising journey of hijinks and the heart.

In The Metal Shredders, Nancy Zafris offers up a refreshingly wise, offbeat and thoroughly convincing look at blue-collar America. Hers is a world rich in humor, steeped in closely held traditions, and filled with gently endearing, slightly crazed characters trying to discover just who they are. In the process they discover much about love, loyalty, family obligation, class and, yes, scrap.

Nancy Zafris is the author of two novels, Lucky Strike and The Metal Shredders, and a book of short stories, The People I Know. She is a winner of the Ohioana Library Association Award. She is currently the fiction editor at the Kenyon Review and editor for the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction series at the University of Georgia Press. She lives in Columbus, Ohio with her husband and son.

Unrated Critic Reviews for The Metal Shredders

Publishers Weekly

Zafris, the fiction editor of the Kenyon Review and the author of the short story collection The People I Know, dissects the decidedly strange subculture of scrap metal workers in her quirky debut novel, delving into the dissolution of an Ohio family's scrap metal operation when 30-ish John Bonn...